Biographical Information:
Shakespeare vs. His Contemporaries

Part 3 of "Critically Examining Oxfordian Claims"

Next, we come to the alleged lack of biographical facts about Shakespeare.
E of O says I make it sound like there's an "ocean" of facts that
Oxfordians are in denial about, and then he asks plaintively, "where is
there any record linking the man with the works?" He goes on to say
that "this is not some literary exercise we can play with any author
either . . . nowhere else is there a complete absence of anything that
would suggest a literary life . . . ." I am astonished by these
statements, which make me seriously wonder if E knows what he is talking
about. I will repeat what I said last year on the SHAKSPER e-mail
conference: the amount and type of evidence linking William Shakespeare
of Stratford with the works attributed to him is extremely comparable to
the parallel evidence for virtually any contemporary of his, and in most
cases is much better.

The first author E mentions as a presumed contrast to Shakespeare
is Marlowe, so I assume E accepts Marlowe's authorship of the plays and
poems we know as his. Let's take a look at the evidence. There are no
manuscripts of Marlowe's plays, no letters written by him or to him, in
fact no examples of his handwriting at all except a signature as witness
to a will in Canterbury in 1585, when he was 21 years old, spelled
"Christofer Marley." Not once during his lifetime was he ever referred to
as a playwright or poet; surviving references spell his name every way
from "Marly" to "Marlin," but almost never "Marlowe." The name
"Christopher Marlowe," in any of its spellings, was never associated with
any play or poem or literary work during the man's lifetime. There is no
evidence to connect him with any acting company, or with the theater in
any way. The only play now generally attributed to Marlowe which was
printed during his lifetime was Tamburlaine, but it was printed
anonymously in 1590, and was not attributed to Marlowe until 1671 (no,
that's not a typo), 78 years after the man's death. In 1594, the year
after "Marley" (as he himself spelled it) was murdered under shady
circumstances, quartos of two plays --- Dido Queen of Carthage and Edward
II --- were published with the names "Christopher Marlowe" and "Chri.
Marlow" (respectively) on their title pages; this was the first time the
name had appeared in any literary context, but (at least by Oxfordian
standards) there is nothing to connect it with the recently-murdered
shoemaker's son from Canterbury. Out of E of O's list of things that
"suggest a literary life," only one applies to Marlowe: we have a record
of his education, since he (supposedly) went to Cambridge. But if I
wanted to play the Oxfordian game, I could easily challege the evidence
for that: most of the Cambridge records which are supposed to be to the
shoemaker's son spell the name "Marlin," and there was another student
there at the same time named Christopher Marley, so those references could
be to him; also, what was "Marley" doing in Canterbury to sign that will
in 1585, when he was supposedly at Cambridge? Anyone who accepts that
Christopher Marlowe wrote plays but refuses to accept that William
Shakespeare wrote plays is applying a double standard of the most
monumental proportions.

Marlowe is probably the most extreme case, but I could go on at length
about other contemporary playwrights. E of O is upset that there is no
record of Shakespeare's education (though the circumstantial evidence for
his attendance at Stratford Grammar School is very strong), but the list of other Elizabethan poets and playwrights for whom
there is also no educational record is a distinguished one: Ben Jonson
(considered the greatest classical scholar in England), Michael Drayton
(one of England's most popular poets, mentioned by Francis Meres in
Palladis Tamia more times than Shakespeare), George Chapman (translator
of Homer, also a great classical scholar), John Webster, Thomas Dekker,
and many others. There are others, such as John Fletcher and Thomas
Heywood, for whom the evidence of schooling does not meet Oxfordian
standards of proof, so we can add them too, if we're going to play by
Oxfordian rules.

As for other kinds of evidence, many of the most
prominent playwrights of the day have left us astonishingly little
evidence of their lives and activities. The Duchess of Malfi and The
White Devil are two of the greatest Jacobean tragedies, both still
performed today; they were attributed at the time to "John Webster," but
this name was not convincingly attached to a real-life person until 1976,
when Mary Edmond showed that the dramatist was almost certainly the son of
a coachmaker also named John Webster. Even so, we don't know exactly when
John Webster was born (1580 is our best guess), where he went to school
(the Merchant Taylors School is a guess), or when he died (it could have
been any time from 1625 to 1634); essentially no personal information is
known about him. Then there's John Fletcher, one of the most popular and
famous Jacobean playwrights (at the time), part of the famous team of
Beaumont and Fletcher. Large chunks of his life are completely
unaccounted for, including the period when he supposedly started writing
plays; we know nothing about the last ten years of his life; we don't know
for sure if he was married; there are no autograph manuscripts of his
plays (though there are some transcripts in other hands), and only a
single signature; his name appeared on title pages of four plays during
his lifetime, but 22 years after his death a massive folio attributed
dozens more plays to him and Beaumont.

Back to William Shakespeare. E of O seems genuinely puzzled when he asks
where there is any record linking the man with the works. Well, for one
thing, his name appeared on the title pages of many plays during his
lifetime, plays which were performed by the acting company of which he was
a member. A man's name on the title page of a published work seems to me
to be evidence that he wrote the work in question, or at the very least,
evidence that people thought he wrote the work. It's true that
Shakespeare's name appeared on a couple of plays (The London Prodigal and
A Yorkshire Tragedy) which are universally agreed not to be his, because
they are markedly inferior to his work and do not appear in the First
Folio; that just means that his name was a selling point, and does not
affect the fact that the publishers of these plays were asserting that he
wrote them. Of course, there's the First Folio, with its commendatory poems
and testimony from Shakespeare's fellows Heminge and Condell, which
Oxfordians are forced to dismiss as a hoax. There is nothing about the
First Folio to suggest it is a hoax; I don't feel like arguing against all
the standard Oxfordian assertions right now, but I'm prepared to do so in
the future. There's also the monument to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity
Church in Stratford. Oxfordians also dismiss this as a hoax, as of course
their theory requires them to; they claim that the monument originally
showed Shakespeare holding a sack of grain and that it was later altered by
conspirators, a scenario I am more than prepared to argue is ludicrous.
Aside from all this, there are also numerous references to William
Shakespeare during his lifetime, including third-person references and
poems addressed to him. Oxfordians claim that these references do not
identify Shakespeare as a person, which is not true; several of them
identify him as an actor (the Parnassus Plays, John Davies' epigram),
and/or as unlearned (Francis Beaumont's poem). (I am fully aware of
Oxfordian attempts to explain away this evidence, and will glady get into
specifics when time permits.) John Davies' epigram, written in 1611, was
manifestly addressed to William Shakespeare, the actor in the King's men,
and certainly not to the Earl of Oxford; I'll argue this point in detail if
need be. When Edmund Howes made a list of modern poets in 1615, he
scrupulously listed them according to social rank (knight, esquire,
gentleman, or none of the above), and Shakespeare was listed as a
gentleman, which in fact Shakespeare of Stratford was.